New York, a tale of two pandemics | Society

The streets of Soho are like the set of a television series that has already ended, so beautiful and empty, they seem unreal. Wall Street, a grave. TO New York He does not shut her up under the water, or under the snow, not even hit by a good cyclone, because there is always a madman who challenges him, or a bar that serves shots in his name; or because the phenomenon itself reverberates between the buildings, claiming its place. It is easier to describe a noise than silence, especially in a place that is so alien to you. Who imagines hearing his own footsteps at four in the afternoon in Times Square; Let another pedestrian say good afternoon to him, as if he were to run into him walking through the mountains or through the town. How to explain why it is so scary to walk through the West Village at night, without a single open place, with the handsome men and women missing, the neon lights off and the sound of breathing through the mask as the only company. Who thinks Broadway without theater, Fifth Avenue without shopping, Manhattan without tourists.

“I never conceived of New York like that, never; I arrived in that crisis of 2008, people lost their homes and jobs, but I have never seen this. Here everything is running, everything is noise, and now it is very sad; It is also scary, going out without people is scary because when there are a lot of people, someone can always help you, ”explains Diego Martín-Téllez, a 31-year-old Mexican, who runs one of the few lunch and coffee shops that remain open, near the south entrance to Central Park.

He, however, keeps running. He gets up at three in the morning to take the subway in Astoria, one of the best-known neighborhoods in the borough of Queens, and have the place up and running around 5.30. When the confinement beganFrom one day to the next, eight employees were fired and Diego and another boy remained. They have enough and enough. The hotels still open in the area, several four-star astronomical prices, now offer rooms for less than half the price, but they hardly sleep there any more than the crews of nurses who have arrived from everywhere.

The coronavirus pandemic is taking its toll on New York, the epicenter of so much in the United States, and also of this atrocious virus. The city’s patient zero was detected on March 1 and this Friday there were more than 1,800 deaths and 57,159 confirmed infections, almost double than last week, one in four throughout the country. Tragedies are part of the DNA of the most populous city in the country. It was burned a couple of times during the Revolution, it was severely attacked during the Civil War, and it was the cradle of the Great Depression; it has also been the victim of 9/11 and a good number of natural disasters. But this has singularly attacked his identity: the din, the crowd, the squeezes, an exotic street lifestyle for many Americans and an ideal breeding ground for infections.

Also the subway, adored as a fetish by artists and travelers from all over the world, has lost its spirit. In a city as brutally unequal as New York, it is the only place where social boundaries evaporate, where both those who run the offices and those who clean them travel. When they come to the surface, each one heads to his department of life, that of negotiating mergers and acquisitions, that of teaching languages ​​or washing dishes, but down there they all live with the same delays and the same filth.

Not so these days. The wagons have run out of tourists and professionals confined to teleworking, so it is practically only used by the homeless and workers like Diego, who this Thursday at seven in the afternoon, after 15 hours of work, is mounted In a carriage back to Astoria, draped in a handkerchief like an outlaw from a western movie.

The data on infections by district, released Wednesday by the city’s Health Department, show how the virus is hitting the poorest areas hardest. There were about 616 confirmed cases per 100,000 residents in Queens and 584 in the Bronx that day, compared to 376 in Manhattan. And within Queens, there are a couple of cursed ZIP codes, 11,368, which covers an area called Corona – yes, it’s called that – and 11,370, East Elmhurst, with the lowest absolute number, but the highest incidence (12 per 1,000 ). The median income for these households stands at $ 48,000, compared to an average of $ 60,000 for the city as a whole, according to census data.

Several factors may weigh in the different incidence, such as the number of tests performed, although Dr. Jessica Justman, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist at the ICAP center in Columbia, highlights the sociological factor. “It makes sense that the working-class areas suffer more exposure to the virus, their positions in essential services, shops, etc., have not closed, as is also the case with health personnel, and they move more; they also tend to share a home more frequently ”, he points out.

In this ground zero of Queens stands the Elmhurst hospital, the most affected by the pandemic, the one that President Donald Trump cited on Sunday to explain his change of opinion and the need to prolong the confinement. “I have seen things that I had never seen before, there are bodies in bags everywhere, in the corridors, they put them in refrigerated trucks because they cannot handle so many corpses. And it’s happening in Queens, in my community, ”he said from the White House.

This Thursday at one in the afternoon, nurse Cynthia Scott, who arrived from Minneapolis to lend a hand, paints it dark. Sitting at the door of the center during her lunch break, she says that the infrastructures of the center are “so poor that it complicates the task even more, there are not enough respirators, decisions are beginning to be made about which patients to let go.”

An imposing Army hospital ship has docked in the city, other makeshift ones have been erected at the Javits fairgrounds, the Billie Jean tennis complex and even in Central Park. And 45 mobile morgues. But materials are missing. On Tuesday, state governor Andrew Cuomo warned that at the rate of new hospitalized patients, only six-day ventilators remained. One of the most graphic images of this crisis was seen last week, when Bill de Blasio, the mayor of the imperial city, with a string of leading centers in medical research, went to personally collect 250,000 donated masks at the United Nations headquarters. United.

Jaqueline Morelo, who works at an orthopedic and other paramedic store across from Elmhurst, has seen this shortage coming for weeks. “In January we were selling a box of 50 surgical masks for $ 30; now, each unit is three dollars, but it is the supplier himself who raised it the same, ”says the 22-year-old.

Jaqueline’s parents just lost their jobs at the same time. He closed the restaurant where he worked and her, the laundry. That is a headache for Anna Soles, who is walking around the neighborhood this Wednesday, without a mask or gloves, looking for somewhere to wash clothes, since most homes do not have washing machines. She walks in her seven-month-old baby’s stroller, covered in rain wrap despite the bright sun. “I protect her as much as I can because I can’t even leave her at home, I live alone,” explains the 25-year-old.

She has also lost her position as event food supervisor and is waiting for the aid checks that the federal government will send so she can pay the rent. Almost 10 million Americans have applied for unemployment benefit in just two weeks and it is already April 1. “But the rent will have to wait because now I have to choose between the food or pay the rent,” adds Soles.

When faced with such a choice, a lot of other dilemmas are erased at a stroke, such as whether to leave or not to leave.

The bustle of workers, or people like Anna, the noise of the bulldozers, which does not stop, they retain part of the usual bustle. The opposite of Wall Street, only disturbed from time to time by the distant sound of ambulances. Sam Stovall, CFRA’s chief investment officer, took the lead two weeks ago and went to Pennsylvania, from where he continues the bustle of the stock market. Similar to what happened to Jaqueline with the masks, Stovall realized that something bad was going to happen when in February, despite all the records of the Stock Market, what began to rise the most were consumer and basic services companies, the “defensive” values.

Since the outbreak, financial markets have seen some of the worst days since the Great Depression, but unlike then, there is no news of a suicide from any banker in New York, although one, Peg Broadbent, 56, has died of coronavirus. ; and another, Peter Tuchman, an entire institution on the Stock Exchange, has tested positive. The park hired its own medical service to test the brokers, But he ended up closing the building on March 23 and emptied the neighborhood.

In some parts, it seems as if the city has been closed so that they could visit it exclusively in small groups. This is what happens this Wednesday afternoon in Bryant Park, the delicious park located between Times Square and the New York Public Library, where only homeless people sit at their tables. Surrounded by them, two slender boys stand out from the scene playing ping pong in short sleeves, as if they were those children throwing pillows at the end of the film Zero in conduct, in unconscious rebellion against authority.

At dusk, when the telework days end, life explodes in different parts of the city, outbreaks of sweet life even. Like the river of people doing sports at the beginning of the Brooklyn Bridge, the traffic in the south of the island or the joggers and walkers of dogs and children next to the field hospital that has been opened in Central Park, opposite the famous center Mount Sinai, on the Upper East Side, one of the choicest parts of Manhattan. David Allen, a retired photographer who lives with his journalist wife in the neighborhood, goes out several times a day with Marley, a four-year-old German shepherd. “I do not wear a mask or gloves, but I am careful, I do not touch anything or anyone, I try not to get infected, if that happens, I hope to be cured, if not, it is that fate wants it that way, I have had a good life,” he explains.

David Allen has health insurance, while Diego is one of the 27 million citizens who do not have it and has not been to the doctor’s office in nine years, since a dentist charged him $ 2,000 for cavities. The stimulus plan approved by Congress includes an item to cover the treatment of those who need it.

The virus does not distinguish between social classes, but everything that happens before and after it does. And few places like New York embody the Dickensian tale of the two cities so fiercely. The local press has published these days that many homeless spend the days of confinement traveling aimlessly in the subway, but the president of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Pat Foye, has clarified that there is no more than before, simply the wagons go more empty and more visible.

“New York has always been competitive, call it brutal, if you like,” answers by phone veteran historian Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University professor specializing in this city. “But it is the city that everyone wants, and I don’t think that will change in the next 50 years; My forecast is that he will come out of this quite well, as he has done on other occasions ”. Like many other second-home New Yorkers, Jackson has left his Manhattan apartment to spend these days away.

Death and resurrection are almost the brand image of this piece of America.

Diego Martín-Téllez says something similar, of a rather Darwinian style. “I adapt very well to things, and this city is about that, this is about coming to work. I think that Mexicans, or Hispanics in general, we adapt ”.

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